[OT] File Storage Server

["Martin Marcher" <martin@marcher.name>]

Hello,

I've been looking around at the dell site (dell preferred since it's
our standard vendor) for server with a lot of disks.

I'm thinking of some box with 2U - 4U (maybe even 5) that will be a
simple fileserver so that I can put debian on it make a SoftRAID
(which is what I prefer since we don't have the budget to order backup
RAID cards if it breaks) put a LVM on top of that and configure the
shares to be available. Now dell has quite a bunch of SAN servers with
9 - 15 disks but those are all prepared SANs which means afaik that
they have some OS preinstalled that will serve iSCSI block devices
where I also need HBA cards in the clients.

In essence all I would like would be a standard server where I can
hotplug a lot of disks and be done with it (RAID resizing etc could be
done from debian then). Something like 2GB RAM a decent CPU (not too
much since it'll be dedicated to file services and RAID) and the
option to add disks. Any hints on what to get? (open to suggestions
apart from dell but I need the option of a service contract in case of
hardware failure...

thanks
martin